COPENHAGEN, Oct 27: Defying furious Russian warnings of reprisals, Denmark vowed on Sunday to go ahead with an international conference on Chechnya only days after a bloody end to a mass hostage-taking by Chechen rebels in Moscow.

Moscow accused Denmark — the current European Union president — of “solidarity with terrorists” and said if the two-day meeting went ahead the Kremlin would boycott a Russia-EU summit planned for next month.

Russia also protested to France for having allowed what it called a “support meeting for Chechen terrorists” to take place in a Paris theatre on Saturday.

The timing of the Copenhagen conference on Chechnya, next Monday and Tuesday, has deeply antagonised Russia. The Kremlin has been seething since a gang of Chechen militants demanding an end to Russia’s war in their breakaway republic seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theatre on Wednesday.

The siege was broken on Saturday when Russian special forces stormed the theatre, leaving more than 100 hostages and 50 of their captors dead.

Moscow warned that it could boycott a summit with the EU in the Danish capital on November 11 aimed at developing a strategic partnership and settling a row over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

“If a meeting of the terrorists’ accomplices goes ahead, the Russia-EU summit will become impossible,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, accusing the Danish authorities of “solidarity with Chechen terrorists”.

The ministry said it had summoned the Danish ambassador in Moscow to convey its message to Copenhagen.

Moscow has also threatened to boycott a Russian-Danish summit planned to take place in tandem with the meeting with the 15-member EU.

But Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller insisted his government “cannot and does not want to ban” the conference on Chechnya in Copenhagen on what he said was a “private initiative”.

“We clearly condemn terrorism but we also have rights under the constitution that say that lawful meetings are allowed to be held,” he said.

But Moeller nonetheless advised the conference organisers to “analyse the situation very carefully and consider how it will be seen across the world”.

The congress, planned by the Chechen diaspora and the Danish Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, is set to focus on the war in the Caucasian Russian republic, the social and humanitarian situation and the problems of refugees and internally displaced persons.

The Russian foreign ministry said it had also summoned the French ambassador to Moscow on Sunday to convey the Kremlin’s “serious concern” that the French authorities had not prevented a “support meeting for Chechen terrorists” in a Paris theatre.

French diplomatic sources said the meeting in Paris had been a private affair and had therefore taken place “without the authorisation or participation” of French officials.

Russia has been bogged down in a bloody conflict in Chechnya since its forces moved into the breakaway Caucasian republic in October 1999.

President Vladimir Putin, whose tough stance on Chechnya helped him into office, has likened his campaign against the republic’s separatists to US President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” since the September 11 attacks.

Delegates from the worldwide Chechen diaspora, Chechnya, Russia and international human rights organisations, as well as representatives of the lower house of the Russian parliament, the 44-nation Council of Europe and the United Nations, are set to attend next week’s Copenhagen meeting on Chechnya.

The EU summit on November 11 is due to seal a deal ending the bitter row over Kaliningrad, which has overshadowed the 15-nation bloc’s plans to take in eight former Soviet satellite states, Malta and Cyprus.—AFP